The message from Thursday night’s Democratic debate is that everybody in America should get on a leaky rowboat and find somewhere, anywhere, else in the world to live — because life in the United States is a nightmare from which millionaires and billionaires and the Koch brothers and the Republicans will not allow us to awake.

The two candidates for the Democratic nomination spent most of two hours arguing over who was the better diagnostician of the moral diseases, ideological calamities, spiritual infirmities, racial injustices and downright evils that are being visited upon the suffering 320 million who have found themselves through no fault of their own trapped between two oceans in a dystopian oligarchic hell they call America.

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were essentially auditioning last night for the role of Snake Plissken. Do you remember Snake Plissken? He was the eyepatch-wearing hero of “Escape from New York,” the 1981 science-fiction picture in which Manhattan has become a prison and Snake Plissken is the only guy who can find the way out.

Only the America from which they want to liberate us is Barack Obama’s America. Oh, they don’t say as much. Hillary blames the Koch brothers. Bernie blames millionaires and billionaires and the campaign finance system. They both blame the Republicans.

But let’s face it: It’s Obama’s world. They and we are all just living in it.

And what a world. “There is,” Sanders said, “massive despair all over this country.” Wages low. Millions in prison.

The highest rate of childhood poverty in the world. The old have inadequate health care, don’t have enough money for food, are chopping up their pills to make them last longer.

Hillary said immigrants are living in fear. There’s systemic racism. Police brutality.

And don’t forget the horrors of being white, with “an increase in alcoholism, addiction, earlier deaths. People with a high school education or less are not even living as long as their parents lived . . . Coal miners and their families who helped turn on the lights and power our factories for generations are now wondering, has our country forgotten us?”

She concluded the debate by saying Sanders’s focus on punishing Wall Street was limited.

That’s because “if we were to stop that tomorrow, we would still have the indifference, the negligence that we saw in Flint. We would still have racism holding people back. We would still have sexism preventing women from getting equal pay. We would still have LGBT people who get married on Saturday and get fired on Monday. And we would still have governors like Scott Walker and others trying to rip out the heart of the middle class by making it impossible to organize and stand up for better wages and working conditions.”

Every now and then, one or the other would grudgingly say America had “potential,” but only to point out that it was potential to which it was not living up. Sanders even went into a long peroration about how horrible it was Hillary once said something nice about Henry Kissinger, who is 92 years old and last served as a US government official 40 years ago.

I thought “The Walking Dead” was a frightening vision of America. That zombie show is a walk in the park compared to Thursday night’s debate.

The loathsome and reprehensible caricature of America foisted upon its citizenry by Sanders and Clinton — a country with undeniably serious problems and challenges that is still the last great hope of Earth and a place Americans should and mostly do still feel grateful to have as their unique birthright — is another sign that we have a great many lessons we’re going to have to learn all over again.

In the 1980s, Democrats found themselves forced to battle the impression that they were anti-American. So desperate were they to dispel this idea that at their convention in 1984, Democrats waved a thousand flags and chanted “USA” and sang the national anthem until their voices went hoarse.

And that was after four years of a Republican president.

In 2016, after seven years of a Democratic presidency, look where they are now.